(NEWARK, NJ) -- Paul Robeson Galleries will host an Opening Reception for "The Magic of Everyday Life: Luis Carle's Queer Translocal Photography" on Thursday, March 3rd from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. The exhibit presents the work of New York Puerto Rican photographer Luis Carle.  It was curated by Arnaldo M. Cruz-Malavé with the assistance of Gregory R. de Silva.

In his over 30-year career, Carle has dedicated himself to documenting the ways queer/Puerto Rican diasporic subjects recreate themselves and their surroundings in everyday life through extravagant gestures and performances that both transform them and their relationship to space.

Following on Puerto Rican critic and performer Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes’s theories about drag and trans performance, we call this ability to transform self and space through gestures and performances translocality. Taken as a whole, the exhibition narrates the arc of Carle’s artistic vision from his exploration of queer nightlife as a response to the devastation of AIDS to his affirmation of migration, mutability and translocality as creatively performative responses to loss in everyday life. It spans from the materiality of the nightlife party to the evanescence of the artist’s craft as a hopeful, continually mutating art that is often caught, as it were, in the middle of a storm and always in transition or in flight.

Paul Robeson Galleries is located at 350 Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd in Newark, New Jersey. Established in 1979, the Paul Robeson Galleries’ mission and programming embody Paul Robeson’s life-long commitment to unfettered artistic freedom, cultural democracy, and transnationalism. The Paul Robeson Galleries is dedicated to presenting art and cultural artifacts as well as educational and public programming in the spirit of the diverse metropolitan context of Rutgers University – Newark. This mission is carried out in the presentation of visual arts exhibitions, gallery education, and public programs, in a network of exhibition spaces across the Rutgers University – Newark campus and Express Newark. The Paul Robeson Galleries works collaboratively with individuals and organizations to achieve this mission.

Image: Luis Carle, Portraits of Queer/Puerto Rican Artists, Street Performers and Activists, Drag March, Pride Weekend, 2020, digital print, Courtesy of the artist.